Black Friday 2008 iPhone Game Sales

In the U.S., the day after Thanksgiving (”Black Friday”) has been the traditional start of the Christmas shopping season and is typically marked by large sales at retail stores. iPhone developers are in on the action with a number of iPhone game sales. Act quickly, as some of these are for very short periods of time:

Free
2079 ($0.99 -> Free) - review/video
Pathways ($4.99 -> Free) - video
Reign of Swords Lite ($0.99 -> Free)
Inside Trader ($0.99 -> Free)
Serpents ($0.99 -> Free)

99 Cents
Dizzy Bee ($2.99 -> $0.99) - review/video
Tetratile ($2.99 -> $0.99)
Turtle Flip ($2.99 -> $0.99)
Consumed ($4.99 -> $0.99)
Motion Pool ($2.99 -> $0.99)
Virtual Pool ($2.99 -> $0.99)
Subway Shuffle ($2.99 -> $0.99) - video
Imagine Touch Poker ($2.99 -> $0.99)

$2.99 and Up
Fleck ($4.99 -> $2.99)
Farkle Deluxe ($4.99 -> $2.99)
Sky Thunder ($4.99 -> $2.99)
Quick Draw ($5.99 -> $3.99)

Gameloft
Diamond Twister ($4.99 -> $2.99) - video
Platinum Solitaire ($4.99 -> $2.99) - video
Backgammon Classics ($4.99 -> $2.99) - video
Block Breaker Deluxe 2 ($4.99 -> $2.99) - review/video
Midnight Bowling ($4.99 -> $2.99) - video

Ambrosia Software
Mr. Sudoku ($4.99 -> $0.99) - video
Mondo Solitaire ($9.99 -> $0.99) - video
Aki Mahjong ($4.99 -> $0.99) - video

EA
SCRABBLE ($7.99 -> $5.99)
YAHTZEE Adventures ($4.99 -> $2.99)
Spore Origins ($7.99->$5.99) - review/video
TETRIS ($7.99 -> $5.99) - review/video

Pangea
Bugdom 2 ($7.99 -> $0.99)
Nanosaur 2 ($7.99 -> $0.99)
Enigmo ($1.99 -> $0.99)

SEGA
Super Monkey Ball ($9.99 -> 7.99)

Linux on the iPhone.

Linux 2.6 kernel has been ported to Apple's iPhone platform, with support for the first and second generation iPhones as well as the first generation iPod touch. This is a rough first draft of the port, and many drivers are still missing, but it's enough that a real alternative operating system is running on the iPhone.



More info:http://linuxoniphone.blogspot.com/2008/11/...-on-iphone.html

This post has been edited by davidgary73: Nov 29 2008, 04:52 PM

Gameloft’s ‘Hero of Sparta’



It’s set, as you’d guess, in ancient Sparta, with you playing a hero who starts out in a pretty confused state. “You wake up one day on the beach, you don’t know who you are, where you are, or what will happen,” says Queriault. “The game is all about finding these things out.”

The obvious comparison on iPhone is Kroll, which has a similar setting. But the two main criticisms of that game were the way it was side-scrolling rather than fully 3D movement, and its relatively short length. Hero of Sparta tackles both of those issues head-on.

So, it’s a fully 3D game, in terms of graphics AND movement. You control your character with a virtual analogue stick at the bottom left of the screen–not a four-way D-pad, note–with two more buttons at the bottom right for attacking and defending.

What’s more, the game features complex Mortal Kombat-like fataility attacks.

When an enemy is seriously wounded, a little blue button pops up, and if you tap it then tap a couple more buttons that appear on-screen, you execute, well, an execution move.



Ferrari GT Evolution Cinematic: Another game from Gameloft planned for December



This post has been edited by davidgary73: Nov 30 2008, 10:37 AM

No price stated yet bro. Hopefully not too expensive.


Read the link below.

http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/830708 (No:18)

Safe Mode
- It is a ‘mobile substrate’ safe mode not an iPhone safe mode as seems to be the impression. Mobile Substrate is written by Saurik. I assume this is put in place to avoid a continual crash of the springboard by some dodgy theme or plugin. This way you can disable the last theme item or any mobile substrate plugin (eg 5 icon dock or new safari file access) that's installed and stop the phone crashing. Just off and restart your phone will revert back to normal phone usage.

Just leave your simcard in the phone.

Gameloft’s ‘Brothers In Arms: Hour of Heroes’ Available Now in AppStore.

Link: (USD 9.99)

View GamePlay:



The iPhone version of the world-famous Brothers In Arms franchise.
14 missions in 3 campaigns: Normandy, Ardennes & Tunisia.
Unbelievable 3D graphics recreating the atmosphere of a real Hollywood WWII blockbuster.
Drive a 4×4 vehicle or a Sherman tank and use a wide range of weapons (bazooka, sniper rifle, machine guns, etc.)
Use the accelerometer function to launch grenades & the touch screen to shoot at enemies.





This post has been edited by davidgary73: Dec 2 2008, 04:48 PM

Apple In-Ear Headphones with Remote and Mic
Link: Apple In-Ear M'sia (Rm 329)

Overview
Rediscover your music.
Put on the Apple In-Ear Headphones, select your favorite track, and hear musical details you never knew existed. It's almost like you're experiencing your music for the first time.

Two drivers in each earpiece.
Each earpiece contains two separate high-performance drivers — a woofer and a tweeter — resulting in rich, detailed, and accurate sound reproduction and amazing bass response for all types of music.

Impressive sound isolation.
Choose from three sizes of soft, silicone ear tips for a comfortable, stable fit. When inserted in your ear, they create a seal that blocks outside noise so you can get the most from your music.

Control your iPod.
The control capsule located on the cable of the right earpiece includes a microphone and three buttons. Here's what you can do with this convenient remote:*Adjust volume by pressing the + and - buttons. Control music and video playback — including play/pause and next/previous — by pressing the center button. Record voice memos on supported iPod models.

Steel mesh caps for protection.
Stainless steel mesh caps protect the precision acoustic components from dust and debris. You can remove the caps for cleaning or replace them with an extra set that's included in the box.



For reasons unknown to us (and many others), the headset's slick in-line volume control buttons don't function on the iPhone. Although it's possible a software update may introduce this functionality for iPhone owners, it may be a hardware limitation. According to Apple, the headphones' mic and center button will still work with the iPhone.

****************

Taiwan will get the iPhone 3G on December 13th

The largest operator in the Taiwan region, Chunghwa Telecom, has finally given us a date when they will be releasing the iPhone 3G in Taiwan. Looks like those who have had to wait for so long will finally get their hands on the iPhone 3G in less than two weeks.



The company said it would sell iPhones exclusively for an unspecified period, with a two-year service contract carrying a minimal month fee of NT$1,049 (about US$ 31). To get a free iPhone with 8GB memory space, people will have to sign a two-year contract with a monthly charge of NT$2,549 (about US$ 76). Or they can buy the phone from Chunghwa Telecom for at least NT$26,600 (about US$ 800) and get a prepaid number.

December 13th is the day that Taiwan residents will be able to pick one up, legally anyway. Chunghwa is also talking with HTC to bring the T-Mobile G1 to Taiwan. Chunghwa is currently offering pre-sales of the iPhone 3G that will run until December 10th. By targeting the holiday season, Chunghwa plans to sell 50,000 units by March of 2009.

******

Developers Can Now Offer Promotional iPhone Apps

Developers can now offer free promotional versions of their iPhone applications, according to a MacRumors report.

Once an application has been accepted to the App Store by Apple, developers can issue up to 50 promotional codes. The codes allow the recipient to download a full copy of the application for free. Presently, these codes can only be used in the U.S. iTunes Stores by using the "Redeem" link in the App Store.




This post has been edited by davidgary73: Dec 3 2008, 10:37 AM

Lot's of complains in apple discussion threads on Fw 2.2 concerning batt usage. Mine still doing ok.

Anyway, is your Location Services "ON". This drains the batt really fast. Disabling some phone settings should help.

This post has been edited by davidgary73: Dec 3 2008, 03:18 PM

@rx330

aiyo...how come? Any apps running behind or recent application installed?

@rx330

Alritey. Hope to hear good news.

Here are the post on the batt problems:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8536723

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?t...97971&tstart=15


Cheers

*********************
Some unpleasant news.

iPhone firmware 2.2 reportedly locking unlocked iPhones

Other than your usual SIM card unlock the only place to get an officially unlocked iPhone is through Hong Kong and parts of Europe. Unfortunately for those who spent untold amounts of money to get an unlocked iPhone 3G, it may all be in vain. The new iPhone firmware 2.2 is reportedly re-locking those iPhones.

Users in the Apple support forums are saying that if you purchase a legally unlocked iPhone and then updated it in another country the device may become locked. “I bought my iPhone 3G legally unlocked from HK, and I just upgraded to iPhone 2.2, but it seems my phone is locked now. On the phone it says emergency calls only and iTunes is saying not supported SIM.”

If you have an unlocked iPhone and have not yet upgraded to the iPhone firmware 2.2 we suggest holding off just in case this ends up being true. You don’t want all that hard earned cash going for nothing. If you simply can’t wait for the update, try getting your hands on the update from the country your iPhone came from.

This post has been edited by davidgary73: Dec 3 2008, 04:09 PM

Indeed it is...not sure if JailBreaking the phone will affect the 3G locking process as Quickpwn requires the phone to be upgraded first to Fw 2.2 upon Jailbreaking. Pretty risky i must say.

Top 10 Paid and Free Apps

Apple has recently pushed out over 10,000 applications and as 2008 comes to a close they have compiled the top ten downloaded applications in each category. The first round of applications consist of both the free and paid most frequently downloaded applications in the App Store’s history. After which you will see the top ten in each category.





This post has been edited by davidgary73: Dec 3 2008, 05:12 PM

Free Apps

Amazon.com, Inc. today announced its Amazon application for iPhone and iPod touch is now available on the Apple App Store. The Amazon app offers an easy way for users to search and browse for products offered by Amazon and thousands of retailers like Target and Macy’s, access Amazon’s popular shopping features such as Customer Reviews, and purchase using 1-Click Shopping and Amazon Prime.

The Amazon app for iPhone and iPod touch includes an experimental feature called “Amazon Remembers”. Amazon Remembers helps customers keep track of items they see in their daily lives and even tries to match photos of products to the same or similar products available on Amazon.com. Customers simply snap photos with their iPhone, the photos are automatically uploaded to Amazon.com, which then tries to find products similar to the ones in the photos. As soon as the customer receives the results, they can then purchase the item immediately or “remember it” for later in their Amazon account.

“We designed the Amazon app to be a quick and easy way for iPhone and iPod touch users to shop, browse, and buy with Amazon.com," said Sam Hall, director of Amazon Mobile. "We're also really excited about Amazon Remembers because it's a fun and useful way to use the iPhone camera to find and remember items while on-the-go. Customers can build visual lists of things they want to remember, buy, or even learn more about."

Link:

Vlingo Voice Enablement iPhone Application

Vlingo Corporation today announced availability of its vlingo for iPhone application on the Apple App Store. This voice-powered application eliminates the need for typing and gives users the ability to dial their contacts, search the Web, access Google Maps, and send status updates for Facebook and Twitter with the power of voice.

"The iPhone offers an innovative multi-touch user interface that is fundamentally transforming the wireless industry," said Dave Grannan, CEO of vlingo. "We're proud to debut our breakthrough voice recognition technology on iPhone, taking simplicity one step further by reducing much of the reliance on typing, making mobile data and applications easier to find and use."

Vlingo for iPhone works across multiple applications on the iPhone. It gives users access to the most commonly used features by using voice, including:

-- PHONE. Initiate calls to anyone in your address book.

-- SEARCH. Look up anything through Yahoo! or Google in one step. Just say, "Web search: concert tickets in Boston," and the results are displayed.

-- MAPS. Look up and map local listings. For example, by saying, "Find Italian restaurants in San Francisco," vlingo will show choices and can populate Google Maps with the touch of a button.

-- SOCIAL. Users can send Facebook and Twitter status updates without typing. Vlingo also automatically embeds a Web browser so users can easily access the mobile versions of Facebook and Twitter to keep track of their friends' updates.

Vlingo gives iPhone users easy access to mobile information with the power of voice. Users do not need to change how they speak or memorize a list of commands so they can say what they want, how they want, and vlingo captures the results - word for word. Vlingo's breakthrough speech recognition technology provides users with a simple way to access almost anything on their handsets. With the most accurate system on the market that gets even better as more users join the community, vlingo gives users the ability to freely mix typing and talking with no limits on what they can say to command the device.

Link:

Interview With A Dev Team Member

This interview was featured on AppleBlog.Blog.hu and was sent in and translated by Hungarian reader panicradio. It is extremely rare that Dev Team members give interviews, and while this is not MuscleNerd, or PlanetBeing speaking here, it’s always nice to have an insight on what these guys do and how they do it.

First of all congrats for the job you did so far, but I think you already know that half of the world is supporting you!
Thanks! Me and my wife read your blog, and after you wrote about the Dev Team, we thought it would be a good idea to find you. Your blog is the first hungarian language blog or newsportal we communicate to directly.
Special thanks for that. Let’s start with who the members of the Dev Team (no names of course) are, and how you organize your work since you are living in different countries, continents.
Members of the Dev Team are software, electronics and cryptographics professionals from all over the world. The members of the team - or much more, the core - are from Hungary, France, Belgium, England, Russia, Israel, Ukraine and the USA. We work in a way, that we distribute our work files among us, and with team work, we put the ideas together. The average age is about 30 years old. Most of us don’t know each others name and never met each other.
How many are you?
Everyone has a full time job - and of course this has influence on the Dev Team’s work, but usually there are 15 active members working on the job at the same time.
How do you organize, where does the idea come from to hack the iPhone, and why did you set it up?
We are high tech enthusiasts and hackers… hackers in a good way. We like to crack things and see how they work. Most of us have worked with UNIX and OS X for a long time. Few of us knew the others from there, and other professionals have joined later, those whose work we appreciate a lot.
Do you get any threats or “feedback” from Apple? Did you have any contact with the company?
Apple never made contact with us. We make sure we never break the law when we release a new software. PwnageTool and QuickPwn are very complicated, because these softwares remove the necessary parts from Apple’s firmware. We NEVER release pirated softwares.
How much time do you spend on the crack, and other iPhone-related works?
We are working on it 24 hours a day. While one of us are working on it, others are sleeping, and we continually switch. IRC is running in the background all the time, even when we are working onour private jobs, so we have worked on the iPhone thousands of hours. I have to mention, that we spend a lot of money on special hardware and reverse engineering softwares, also from our own money.
Do you get any donation, do you make any profit out of the huge work you made anyway?
We finance everything with our own money. Most of the team has a good job that pays good money in the IT field. The Dev Team is our hobby and although it is very time consuming, yet it still is a hobby. We didn’t take money from anyone!
How many people cracked their iPhones with your program? Do you have any idea how much iPhone users freed their phones?
We have more than hundred thousand recurrent PwnageTool and QuickPwn users. It is hard to estimate how many exactly, but a lot.
Why it is so hard to unlock the iPhone 3G? What is the main difference between 2G and 3G that has prevented the unlock so far?
Apple and Infineon made a very serious work and made almost impossible to unlock the iPhone 3G. They learned from what we did with 2G and made the 3G much more safer.
How far are you from suceeding with the unlock?
This is secret of course.
How deep was the 2.2 baseband update? If you want to make a sim-unlock on this as well, do you have to start the job from scratch? So, if someone accidently updated the baseband, does he have to give up, or does he still have a chance to unlock his phone?
At the moment the exploits we used to run our codes on 2.1 and older basebands has been removed from 2.2. 2.2 closed the security breach we used to control the baseband as we wanted and at the moment 2.2 baseband is bad.
What do you mean “bad”?
In 2.2 baseband there is no such an exploit we can use, so it is bad :-).
What do you think about the sofware and hardware of the iPhone 3G compared to other smartphones?
The iPhone OS is very advanced technology. It is years ahead of everything you can buy on the market at the moment. And yes, I am an Apple fan, but nobody can deny that iPhone is almost futuristic. T-Mobile’s G1 is the second best device after iPhone, but it is still behind 18 months at least I think.
Why do these two devices have advantage over others?
The iPhone OS is based on UNIX/Mach operating system, and both UNIX and Mach is a result of many years of developement. G1 is using Linux, which has a similar story. Fortunately nowadays mobile processors are powerful enough to use UNIX.
What kind of deficiency does the iPhone OS have, and in which direction would you develop it, if it depended on you?
It would need to be more open.
Why and for who do you do your work?
First of all for myself, for us, and for the people who prefer an unlocked phone. We bought a flat in Budapest with my wife, and the agent does not come to our home every week to check if we had painted the walls red, does he? The situation is similar with the IPhone and other devices we buy as well.
What do you do on week days?
We work and play. We have a very special Hungarian Vizsla (deerhound), he keeps us busy all the time.
Why did you choose a pineapple as your logo?
Apple/Pinapple, Pwn/Own, PwnApple (Pwning Apple)

This post has been edited by davidgary73: Dec 4 2008, 10:20 AM

"Standby was abt 6 hours, usage was 2 hours +"

Looks like you have some application running on background. You may need to find which app is causing the batt drain.

Mines is standby 20hrs 35 mins and usage 1hr 42 mins, full-charged 5pm yesterday. I still have 85% of batt left.

This post has been edited by davidgary73: Dec 4 2008, 12:53 PM

@rx330

hmmm..hard to find out which apps also. Maybe untick your apps in iTunes and select the important apps that you use everyday and see how it goes.

Then proceed to tick the rest later.

First In-Game Trailer for ‘Hero of Sparta’

Gameloft has posted the first in-game trailer for their upcoming game Hero of Sparta. An early look at the game described it as a fully 3D game in terms of graphics and movement.
You control your character with a virtual analogue stick at the bottom left of the screen–not a four-way D-pad, note–with two more buttons at the bottom right for attacking and defending.

The game is expected for release for the iPhone in December.

@CooLeRthings

Here you go.

http://forum.lowyat.net/index.php?showtopic=845633&hl=itunes

http://forum.lowyat.net/index.php?showtopic=769083&hl=itunes

I reckon you did not read pinned threads.

Please read the link below:

http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/830708 (No:20)

This post has been edited by davidgary73: Dec 5 2008, 03:14 PM